Flex is a tool for generating scanners. A scanner, sometimes called a
tokenizer, is a program which recognizes lexical patterns in text. The
flex program reads user-specified input files, or its standard input
if no file names are given, for a description of a scanner to generate.
The description is in the form of pairs of regular expressions and C
code, called rules. Flex generates a C source file named, "lex.yy.c",
which defines the function yylex(). The file "lex.yy.c" can be compiled
and linked to produce an executable. When the executable is run, it
analyzes its input for occurrences of text matching the regular
expressions for each rule. Whenever it finds a match, it executes the
corresponding C code.
